Pattinson injuries no worry for Arthur on Windies Tour

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James Pattinson is set to miss the start of the Caribbean tour due to injury but there’s no way coach Mickey Arthur is going to ask the young Australian quick to ease up.

Pattinson is struggling with a left buttock strain suffered in last week’s triangular one-day series finals and is expected to miss at least Friday’s (Saturday AM AEDT) opening one-dayer against the West Indies.

It’s a further setback for the 21-year-old after his summer was curtailed with a foot injury midway through the Test series against India.

But Arthur says injuries are part and parcel of fast bowling and he won’t be telling any of his youngsters to go easy to preserve their bodies.

“I would bowl him every day of the week if I could and let him loose … the more for him the better,” Arthur told AAP.

“I feel the same for all the younger bowlers. I think we’ve got to live with the fact that bowling is a real tough gig and guys are going to break down.

“We’ve just got to get them ready to go again after that.”

Pattinson and the rest of the Australian cricket team took a day off on Sunday after arriving in St Vincent and the Grenadines on Saturday following a long journey halfway round the world.

It means the team won’t have its first look at the Arnos Vale Cricket Ground, location for the first three of five one-day matches, until Monday afternoon’s training session.

But Arthur said resting and revitalising after a long journey was the most important thing right now.

“The trip was hugely long and very tiring. For us it’s quite important to let the guys just settle in today,” he said.

“It also gives us as management a chance to go through exactly what we want to go through with the guys and get our planning and our strategising right.”

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The Crowd Says (6) | Page of Comments

I really have to wonder if our quicks are truly struck down by injuries, or whether the advances of sport medicine and MRI scans means that injury management has gone extremely conservative.

What Arthur says is spot on in that fast bowlers will feel pain while playing, and that is a part of it. Stress fractures, thigh strains and broken bones are fair dinkum injuries, fatigue is not. And again, I don’t feel the bowling workload is more than before, I just feel the travel is more arduous, and there isn’t enough time for sufficient recovery.

Cricket should stop treating our players as high-performance athletes and start treating them as cricketers…

General fatigue, maybe, Vas. But fatigue on muscles or joints can lead to injuries. If you get an MRI scan on part of their body and shows the part of the body is worn or under stress, then better to miss a few weeks doing rehab, than have a 6-month injury.

James, I agree there has to be proper injury management. But I struggle to comprehend how these injuries are somehow more prevalent to modern fast bowlers than their predecessors.

If you look at the bowling workloads of any county bowler during the World Wars or even Test cricketers who played for their nation and chose county stints, their numbers were ridiculous.

Modern fast bowlers bowl LESS than their predecessors, but the three factors that have changed are arduous travel, injury identification, and lastly, adequete recovery period between games.

This is where the absence of tour matches have made a real difference. In the past, teams would schedule three or four tour games in the lead up to a Test match. But now, they have made way for more one day internationals and Twenty20s.

The tour games allowed nearly all members from the touring party to have adequete match practice in the lead up to a game, as well as giving them one or two matches off to recover. Instead, whatever time off is taken up by training, ice baths, sponsorship arrangements etc.

There is a commercial reality to all of this. But I think that things have taken an extremely conservative method that actually doesn’t teach fast bowlers to cope through possible pain, something their predecessors must have done repeatedly, yet they somehow coped…

I’m not sure about Cummins, because what was originally a “bruised heel” turned into something he missed the entire summer for.

But Pattinson had a slight thigh strain which forced him to miss five weeks of cricket. What they gain from fully resting the muscles, they miss out on attuning themselves to proper match fitness and a work pattern that allows them to play through pain…

I don’t think Pattinson’s injury has anything to do with his bowling load. According to press reports at the time, Arthur said Pattinson strained a glute muscle while diving in the field during Australia’s loss to the Sri Lankans in the second ODI final in Adelaide.